Disable Project Auto-Activation?

Dorico
1

Hi Daniel,

Hoping you can help us out! We’ve just updated all of our licences to Dorico 2 Pro and are looking forward to delving into the software over the next few weeks. We’re attempting to use NotePerformer 3 with Dorico, but I’m sure this applies to all playback engines.

Our usual large-scale orchestration workflow for transferring from Nuendo to Sibelius is as follows:

  1. Quantise all note values and lengths in Nuendo & export MIDI file
  2. Import MIDI into notation software and transfer into project template (a different, pre-prepared file)
  3. Orchestrate!

Some MIDI projects we receive from composers can contain up to 200+ MIDI tracks, with perhaps 8 ‘Horn’ tracks, that will all need to be condensed into 3 staves for example. As such, we usually spend a lot of time flicking between projects, copying and pasting staves, musical phrases etc. from the imported MIDI score to the template score, but attempting this in Dorico is rather slow as we have discovered that each time a separate project is selected the project must be ‘activated’ before any work can be done.

In Nuendo this is similar, except that a project can be opened ‘inactive’, and as such one does not have to wait for the engine to boot up when switching quickly between them. As we do not require any playback functionality at this stage in the orchestration process it would be fine to simply leave one project ‘de-activated’, whilst keeping the other ‘activated’, but we can’t find a way to do this?

Please could you let us know if this is possible, or if there is a workaround to speed up this process?

Thanks in advance.

Wes
Maestro Music UK
www.maestromusicuk.com

2

In the future, Dorico will load sounds in a background thread, so in general switching between two documents should be faster (the time taken to load the sounds would be the same, but you’ll be able to work while it does the loading), and we do still plan to actually make the button on Dorico’s toolbar to activate a project work as well, but for the time being you can use a special “Silence” playback template to prevent Dorico from doing any sound loading at all.

Take the contents of the attached zip file and put them in the following folder:

Mac: /Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico 2
Windows: %APPDATA%\Steinberg\Dorico 2

You should have two folders, one called PlaybackTemplateGenerators and another called PluginPresetLibraries, in there, each of which should contain a further folder called Silence.

When you start Dorico, you’ll then find ‘Silence’ as a choice in the list of playback templates in the Preferences dialog: you can make this the default playback template for new projects there. You can also choose Play > Playback Template and set ‘Silence’ there. To get playback back again, do Play > Playback Template and choose one of the other playback templates.
silence-playback-template.zip (5.36 KB)

3

Hi Daniel,

Many thanks for the quick reply. Will download this now and give it a go!

Thanks,

Wes
Maestro Music UK
www.maestromusicuk.com

4

Hi Daniel,
I had the same ‘issue’. Thx for this solution. My idle “VST Audio Engine” CPU usage drops from ca. 15,5% to ca. 8%. It’s not completely idle, but now my macbook (13", late 2013 version) can work longer.
Thanks,
Steven